Training other people’s children is one of the most significant responsibilities I’ve undertaken.
It’s a huge moment of trust when a parent leaves you with their child, and I feel as if me and the kid are enveloped in a white-hot spotlight of attention. Everyone can see everything I do, and they’re watching in relation to the child.
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2.
Bluebeard is the grisly tale of a powerful, wealthy nobleman who marries a young, innocent peasant girl. She discovers, while he is away, that her new husband has beheaded his previous wives once they have ceased to amuse him. In part, it is a cautionary tale about a rich, powerful man’s objectification of a young, naive woman.
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I tend to peruse my Netflix and Stan accounts with dismay. Firstly, they clash with the portrait I paint of myself socially, as someone who ‘doesn’t watch television.’ Secondly, I find that I’ll open an account with a streaming service because I want to see something specific, like Parasite, for example, and then I’m confounded by the volume of crap I don’t want to see that comes with it.
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“Evil floats, weightlessly across the landscape of Los Angeles in Nicolas Winding Refn’s new film, The Neon Demon, co-scripted with TV writer Mary Laws and British dramatist Polly Stenham. It is a reverie of such sheer satanic rapture that Refn could be on danger of taking Bret Easton Elis’ crown as the Aleister Crowley of the 21st century.”
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I was fairly horrified by the film ‘A Promising Young Woman’, especially the murder at the end.
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‘There must be rites,’ [the Fox said].
‘What’s a rite?’ asked the Little Prince.
‘It is a thing too often neglected…’
The Little Prince,
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
p.61
I have a young man coming to see me for boxing training. His older brother bought him a ten-session package for an eighteenth birthday present, because learning to ‘handle yourself’ is considered one of the quintessential rites of passage.
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Anyone who has been abused by a family member, or a partner, understands unconditional love.
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You embarrass the roses
I see them leaning together, whispering, looking,
Murmuring in spiteful, jealous consensus
As you pass by
The authority of your stride moving through your skirt
with the subtlety of a breeze
You’re wearing your Mona Lisa smile
And I know
That the secret that fills the vortex
at their centre is darkness, emptiness –
Their petals shamefully shroud this painful secret
Until time undoes the strings of their bodice
and they are dissolute
The roses know
That your eyes, your centre, is filled with liquid electricity
that is ever lustrous
That liquidity, that electricity
Is the current that animates your animal grace
So potent that, at forty-four,
It’s begun to scorch the filaments of your jet-black hair
And the roses know I ache for you,
and they also know
that your light
and my ache
are the same.
I’d never read Flannery O’Connor until lockdown. I’d seen her listed as one of the outstanding writers of the twentieth century, specifically in terms of her short stories. I had time on my hands, so I bought her collected works.
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The first disturbing event of first-year university was the day I went to meet a childhood friend of mine when he was discharged from the insane asylum.
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Theme Park at its Darkest 